Making a backup of my Time Capsule

Question

Bonjour,
Sorry if this has already been asked; I could not find what I was looking for.
I have a Time Capsule (500 GB) which connects to a MacBook Pro, an XP desktop and a Vista laptop. I make backups of my PCs each week (ish) and store them on an external drive in a vault. (yes, I have been scorched)
In the two months since I bought it, I notice that it has started filling up alarmingly. My Mac backup directory is roughly 356 Go, whereas I know that I am only using about 75 Go on my hard drive.
Is there a way of copying my Time Machine's backup to an external drive? On my PCs, I simply backup direct to external drive. I would love to be able to:
1 - from my PCs, backup direct to the Time Capsule
2 - copy this and my latest Mac backup to an external drive.
Is it possible? Why is the MAc backup so huge?
Thanks for your time,
Rick

Answer 1

RickIsTrying wrote:
if I have 385Go of info on my TC but only 75 on my hard drive, would it make an archive equivalent to the 75G?
The amount that will be backed up will be the 385 GB.
For the PC backup, it was not too bad; I select a destination for the backup files and I just point to the network disk, the TC.
Will that really work? I wouldn't expect Windows to understand a disk formatted to satisfy Time Machine.
It's annoying about the TC behaviour. I would like to backup photos and songs from the various computers in the house, but from what I gather, eventually all the space will be used up by the TM software.
It's understandable why it works that way. It's trying to preserve as much backed-up data as it can.
You can reserve space on the Time Capsule disk by creating a "disk image" (.dmg file) and copying it to the Time Capsule disk. Don't make it a "sparse disk image"; you need to allocate all the space you want to begin with. To use the disk image you'll have to first "mount" it. That technique won't work with a Windows computer, as it won't know anything about a Mac OS X disk image.
Is there a way of purging older versions (there's a blast from my VMS days...)?
That happens automatically as the Time Machine disk fills up. You could try mounting the Time Machine "sparsebundle" file, but (1) I'm not sure how easy it would be to delete anything in it, (2) it would be easy to mess up all your Time Machine backups, and (3) doing that wouldn't necessarily free up any space unless you could perform some sort of "compress" operation on the "sparsebundle" file. (I worked on VMS as recently as 2004.)